Right Now With Perry Bacon

Maine Governor Janet Mills, a Democrat, announced on Tuesday that she is running for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Republican Susan Collins. Mills, having twice been elected statewide, is in some ways the perfect candidate for one of the few seats that Democrats have a realistic chance of flipping in next year’s elections. (They need to gain four seats for a Senate majority.) Senate Major...

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Arkadi Gerney, a Democratic strategist, says Democratic governors and attorneys general have the greatest ability to stop Trump—and they’re doing it in ways that are underappreciated. In the latest episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon , Democratic strategist Arkadi Gerney argues that the United States is in the midst of a “ cold civil war. ” For liberals to win it, they must use “hardball” tactic...

New Mexico will soon become the first state with universal free childcare. In November, New Mexico will become the first state with no-cost childcare for all children , state officials announced recently. The program will offer up to 10 hours of childcare each day, for kids up to age 12. On the latest edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon , Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham explained how she and Dem...

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Jimmy Kimmel strongly defended free speech and slammed President Trump in his return to late night after a brief suspension. In the latest edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon , New York Times opinion writer E.J. Dionne and Perry discussed why Kimmel’s fast return was such a coup for pro-democracy voices. He also argued that Democrats are positioning themselves better than in the spring to win co...

Representative Greg Casar says the Trump administration is an alliance of the superwealthy and the right-wing—and that Democrats can defeat them by becoming a pro-worker, anti-billionaire party. The decision by Trump administration officials to reportedly drop an investigation into allegations that Trump border czar Tom Homan took bribes is the last example of this being “the most corrupt administ...

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Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension by ABC is another example of both media capitulation to President Trump and the administration’s war on the press , say Kathy Roberts Ford , a journalism professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and TNR contributor Ana Marie Cox . In the latest edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon , the two explain why Kimmel’s suspension is so alarming. They connected it to...

President Trump should not be deploying the National Guard to cities without the permission of their mayors, says Justin Bibb, the mayor of Cleveland and the current president of the Democratic Mayors Association. In the latest edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon, Bibb sharply criticized the Trump administration’s urban policies. He touted declining crime rates in cities across the country, incl...

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Representative Jamie Raskin says congressional Democrats should not vote for any government funding bill that does not extend soon-to-expire Obamacare subsidies and prevent Trump and Republicans from arbitrarily ending spending that was already appropriated by Congress. In the latest edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon, the Maryland congressman said the spending bill is an opportunity for Democr...

In an excerpt of her upcoming memoir published by The Atlantic, Kamala Harris is very critical of Joe Biden and his White House aides. She describes Biden’s decision to seek a second term as “recklessness” and repeatedly suggests the president’s top advisers undermined her. In the latest edition of Right Now , TNR Contributor Meredith Shiner and Perry explain why Harris’s candor surprised them. Th...

The Democratic Party leadership’s strategy of downplaying many of Trump’s actions as a “distraction” is a mistake, say political writer G. Elliott Morris and Amanda Litman, executive director of Run for Something , a group that helps younger Democratic candidates pursue elective office. Such rhetoric is boring and means that the public tunes out Democrats, Morris and Litman argue. In a conversatio...

House Democrats have released Jeffrey Epstein’s “Birthday Book,” and it’s brutal for President Trump. His note to Epstein is real and it appears to bear his distinctive signature. There’s also an image of Epstein holding a big check that discusses selling a “fully depreciated” woman to Trump. On Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, visibly irritated, offered some truly absurd spin about Trum...

There’s been an amusing turn in the saga involving President Trump’s vile effort to remove Lisa Cook as governor of the Federal Reserve. Trump has relied on his flunkies to cook up allegations of mortgage fraud against Cook—and other foes as well—but now news organizations have blown big holes in the scam. They’ve reported that numerous Trump officials, and even relatives of his top ally in the an...

President Donald Trump’s losses in court are suddenly piling up on many crucial fronts at once. Most of his tariffs were just ruled illegal, prompting him to explode in fury. An appeals court blocked Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act for deportations. And a judge invalidated Trump’s cancellation of grants to Harvard. There’s a big through line here that deserves attention: Judges are taking a v...

Both prominent center-left Democrats and President Trump seem wary of Zohran Mamdani becoming mayor of New York City. But their motives are different, says TNR’s Monica Potts. In the last edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon , Potts argues that Trump sees former Governor Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani’s main opponent, as a potential political ally if Cuomo is elected mayor. Meanwhile, centrist Democrats,...

At a Senate hearing on Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. got massacred by harsh questioning from Democrats and Republicans. They called out his anti-vax views and condemned his decapitation of our public health system. But Matt Gertz of Media Matters noticed something funny: Fox News’ coverage bent over backward to portray him as pro-vaccine, as someone working to...

Michigan Lieutenant Governor Garlin Gilchrist II says Trump’s policies aren’t resonating in his state, even though it backed him in last year’s elections. That provides an opportunity for Democrats, he argues. President Trump’s policies, particularly tariffs, are annoying voters in left-leaning Detroit but also more conservative, rural areas of Michigan, says Lieutenant Governor Garlin Gilchrist I...

The pressure is escalating on President Trump and Republicans to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. Survivors of Epstein’s sex trafficking spoke out on Wednesday, and one of them, Haley Robson, directly took on Trump in a very powerful way. She denounced him for calling the Epstein files a “hoax,” and called on Trump to recognize that the victims are human beings whose suffering should not be mini...

President Trump suffered a major loss Tuesday when a federal judge in California ruled that his military occupation of Los Angeles was illegal. Trump’s response was highly unsettling. Speaking to reporters, he sounded entirely unconstrained. He threatened to resend the military to L.A. and declared that the military is now definitely going into Chicago. He let out a strange, angry rant about crime...

In an ugly move, Fox News contacted Republican Senators and asked: Should President Trump deploy the National Guard in your states’ blue cities? Fox News got back the answer it was trying to generate: GOP Senators actively want Trump to use the military in their states’ urban areas, ostensibly to fight “crime.” This is an unnerving turn in the saga that makes Trump’s threat look worse. Congression...